Somewhere in early Pleistocene South Africa…
An adult hominin searches along a stream; the distressed calls from an abandoned infant have awakened its parental instincts; even if the baby has been abandoned by a rival clan, it cannot remain indifferent. Unfortunately, there is no baby, and it has instead walked into an ambush…
This piece is actually inspired by a Mexican legend that is still repeated often to this day.
A person is walking or riding a horse in the wilderness, and hears the unmistakable cries of a child, usually near water. They eventually find the child, who is apparently abandoned; there is no sign of the parents.
The well intentioned person carries the baby away, but soon the baby, despite remaining the same size, becomes heavier and heavier, and suddenly bares huge sharp teeth and snarls something along the lines of “look at my teeth!”.
Naturally the rescuer drops or throws the creature away and flees (in rare cases, the false baby might even chase for a short distance, crawling!), but the damage is done; the person suffers what’s known as “mal de espanto”, a supernatural fright so bad they stop eating and sleeping, become despondent, and eventually die, unless proper ritual is observed.
Stories like this exist elsewhere in the world. It is also inspired by stories of La Llorona, a wailing spirit said to haunt Mexican waterways; I once heard about a place where La Llorona was said to scare people. Interestingly, tracks from a puma were found at the site as well. Pumas, being of the cheetah linneage, cannot roar; but they can produce all sorts of screams, shrieks and other many sounds which can be very scary to lone travelers in the woods.
The picture suggests the prehistoric African puma (Puma incurva) as an aggressive mimic; same as margay is known to mimic the cries of baby monkeys to attract adults to an ambush. P. incurva may have been hunting our early ancestors before leopards and lions did.
Perhaps that trauma is why we invented legends like the manticore and the leucrotta- a mix of feline and human features and the ability to call their victims to their doom, having stalked them long enough to learn their name.
The susceptibility of the mind to fool itself is legion. Throw in fear, superstition, and mental illness and you have an interesting cocktail for stories like the above.
The last weekend of August, I was on my property and I could hear someone whistling outside. I sort of freaked because no one is ever there. I was looking around trying to find who it was and seeing nothing. Finally I looked at the jug in my hand and it was whistling air. That is all it takes to start a story.
I read this years ago and it had good examples of how we are fooled. One thing that stuck with me was a sound that was scaring people in a house. A chimney was shaped just right to make an inaudible sound that resonated in the body as a vibration. This creeped people out and no one could explain it until equipment was used. It is a good book in defense of rationalism.